Open vs Closed Society, where is Canada heading?

I have been wondering, like a number of Canadians, how long it would take Harper to move our country along  toward a less open/more totalitarian society.  The following post from The Regina Mom is an excellent expose that puts the case forward that we are moving along this path more quickly than most progressives (conservative and leftist) would have imagined.

I highly recommend this to all of you who want to understand where we are moving and how quickly Harper is taking us down this road.

Canada creeps toward becoming a closed society

Nick Fillmore asks a question the regina mom has been grappling with for years: “Is Stephen Harper displaying fascist-like tendencies?” Ever since Naomi Wolf published “Ten Steps To Close Down an Open Society” at the Huffington Post in April, 2007, an essay has been brewing on trm‘s computer. (Yes, trm admits to being a slow writer.)

Wolf’s research for that article became the book, The End of America, which documents “how open societies become closed societies.” Her family’s friends, Holocaust survivors, urged her to explore a few texts and the result was what she called a “blueprint” that has been adapted by several societies when making a shift from an open to a closed society. In the HuffPo piece she named ten significant pieces of the blueprint and showed how they were at work in the USA at that time.

To complement Nick Fillmore’s work, trm thought she’d finally share, in point form, what she discovered by placing Wolf’s blueprint on Canada

Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

• What’s more terrifying to a parent than ‘child pornographers’? According to Vic Toews, the regina mom’s opposition to Bill C-30 — the Snoop and Spy bill — means that she stands with “the child pornographers”. How does that make a mother feel?
• Women should be used to it, perhaps. Years ago, the Prime Minister suggested women’s groups are of the “left-wing fringe

• More recently, as trm has noted, on the eve of the Joint Energy Board’s hearings on the Northern Gateway Pipeline, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver had choice words to describe those in opposition to the proposed pipeline. He painted “environmental and other radical groups” as those wanting to “block this opportunity to diversify our trade” regardless “the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth.” The groups have a “radical ideological agenda” and will “exploit any loophole they can find” to “kill good projects” with “funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.”

Create a gulag

• What is the purpose of new prisons when Canada’s crime rate is falling? National Chief Sean Atleo understands.

• Canadians can also rot in Guantanamo.

Develop a thug caste

• The RCMP have proven to be thugs and are watched by the public. The taser attack on Robert Dzeikanski is but one instance of their thuggery. [Warning: It is difficult to watch.]

• The Fifth Estate‘s documentary, Out of Control, about the suicide of Ashley Smith when she was improperly incarcerated in a penitentiary and allowed to die. [Warning: It is difficult to watch.]

• The Canadian Race Relations Foundation has found reason to comment on policing in Canada.

• Extreme violence attributed to white supremacist youth. A “dump” by the “hacktivist” group, Anonymous, confirmed that some of the accused are associated with neo-Nazi groups in the USA.

Set up an internal surveillance system

• Since 9/11 Canadians have witnessed an alarming increase in surveillance measures. Are the new airport scanners and procedures are part of the scheme?

• It looks as though Vancouver’s making use of public cameras to invade privacy. So is Victoria.

• What is Bill C-30 really about, anyway?

• BC’s Civil Liberties Association reports on how we’re moving towards a surveillance society.

Harass citizens’ groups

• Dennis Greunding has a list of citizens’ groups which have faced funding cuts courtesy the current regime. trm previously mentioned some, specifically those impacting women. Certainly these, when combined with more recent cuts to organizations such as the Mennonite Central Committee, constitute harassment.
• Forest Ethics supports its former employee in his allegations that the PMO is trying to “to silence and intimidate non profit organizations like ForestEthics, and the thousands of citizens and civil groups who, like us, are concerned about the direction this country is taking and are speaking out.“
• The criminalization of dissent came as a creeping assault until the most noteable at the G20 demonstrations last year

• Continue reading the last five points here